Red sandals
(a vignette celebrating some dimensions of red)
I’ve been painted antique gold by Marie, the jazz singer who owns me. Red is the color of creativity and I’m naturally a glorious shade, but tonight she’s going to see Il Barbiere di Siviglia with an admirer who’s meeting clients before the performance.
Not that she wouldn’t wear red sandals if she wanted to with her black dress, touches of red, and rose in her hair. Her favorite song is “Hang Tough,” New Orleans style, and she knows how to sing it. The clients will be more impressed with gold, she explained, even after they drink too much at intermission. Changing my color is just for tonight.
My former owner was an astronaut who wore my heels down tripping to the moon. I was her ‘good luck’ pair – not serious like her, she said, who did look serious in her moon-walk boots. I don’t understand why she had me re-heeled – then left me to be re-sold. I heard her say, though, that she wanted to go out in style, like Yeats’ wild old wicked man, not at home tucked under pink sheets. Maybe she wanted to give me that kind of send-off.
All my owners have been soulful nonconformists, each quite distinct. I’ve had a few – traveling friend to friend – and then there are the eternal ‘live again’ consignment shops where my current owner and I met. ‘Red sandals, new heels! Voila!’ she cried, and kissed me. Tomorrow she’ll peel this gold away. Tonight we visit Rossini at the Met. I’ve heard opposites attract (though not for long) and I’m guessing her partner will be dressed in grays and gold jewelry.
.
On a beach
(vignette from a dream)
Trees undulate and wrap around one another in the twilight. Ferns and succulent leaves fade then emerge again. A pre-rhinoceros creature with low hanging skin munches tall grass.
Leaving my body on a large rock I view its pose. Long, biomorphic shapes appear around the rock and a young boy forms from them whose body is transparent.
My focus shifts to light flowing towards me from an unknown source and I find myself before an ocean shimmering waves of green, blue and gold. The rock I sit on now is bleached skeleton white.
I climb down and draw a circle, section it into north, south, east and west. The north represents strength where a small shell is growing larger and more opaque. A test of strength is required by the Master of Games which I must pass to move on.
I close then open my eyes, feeling a hand on my shoulder. A young man is standing beside me, the same I saw earlier but now he’s taller and more visible.
‘Snuck-up-on doesn’t bode well,’ I say, feeling his strength and liking it. Determination lines edge his mouth. His eyes are like blue ice in summer.
‘I’ve come as required by the Quest,’ he says. ‘My name is Adam – I’m from the West. You are my partner in this test of strength?’
‘Strength is power well-used,’ I say. ‘Take your hands off my shoulders.’
‘If you’re going to resist I cannot be your knight.’
‘I’m used to the absence of chivalry,’ I retort, perversely recalling the line from Sartre’s No Exit: ‘Hell is other people.’ At least the knight doesn’t call me ‘chick’.
‘What is our test?’ he asks, dropping his hands.
I point to the shell, which has grown to around four feet from mouth to tip. ’The Master of Games left instructions inside its tip, and we’re to get them out without cracking the shell,” I reply. ‘The instructions will tell us what to do next. They will disappear if the shell cracks.’
We walk drowsily to the shell, drawn into its iridescence. Rainbow lights burst from its mouth along with the distant voices of ancient tribes.
‘Only the beauty of a thing can trap a man. That’s why it’s important to see through it,’ he says, not looking at me.
The voices become louder, speaking in rhythms and ancient tongues. The shell glitters in the sun. I feel his heightened energy and interest.
‘It’s up to you to be faithful to our mission,’ he says.
That wakes me – I’ve a lot to say when I get the chance.
.
His Ambition And Mine
W.B. Yeats wrote for his own race
of its dreamings
and the gleamings of its future.
He said he wrote of a people
who refused to be slaves, or their masters.
He wrote, too, of the best that could be had,
what makes an old man mad,
knew all things fall and are built again
and didn’t fantasize about renewal
in civilizations that had fallen.
My own race cowers before critics it feeds,
accepting their verdicts,
ignoring their motives,
remembering the wrong it has done
and forgetful of what it has given a world
that still beats a path to its bounty.
It trusted Freud, Boas, Mead,
Adorno, Derrida and Marx,
adders under neon apple trees —
its foundations destroyed,
is my race slowly dying out
because it believes it should?
Are other races more worthy?
What truth gleams here —
who will be left to care?
Crocodile and cockroach have long endured,
each a stunning model of survival,
but there seems no impulse in tigers,
dolphins and other creatures near extinction
to turn into either.
I cannot write of my race’s future,
of its infinite possibility,
as I watch it shrink and pander,
its treasures melting down,
its soul offered to the winds.
© poems by Joneve McCormick 